It's Time to Start Over
For most of my 75
years of life, I have been trying to figure out why the church's growth has
been so slow and getting slower, why it is so inefficient in everything it
does, and why it has such a minimal good effect on the rest of the nation and
the world. The expectations of the prophets in the Book of Mormon were that
when the church finally did show up in the last days it would be an amazing
whirlwind which would change the world, using the Book of Mormon to accomplish
that Herculean feat. Needless to say, we are a great deal less than a whirlwind
at this point.
In recent years we
have seen another discouraging phenomenon where many thousands of church
members suddenly discover that there are many things about the history of
church which they never realized or thought about, and upon realizing these
matters, they suddenly decide that the church is not as full of truth and
integrity as they expected, and they either leave directly or are put into a
great quandary about what to do about the church and the many questions
circulating around it.
We now have some
circumstances where the church leaders have essentially berated the church
members for not having sufficient levels of unquestioning faith in the church
and its leaders to fully support these institutions, no matter what questions
may remain unanswered.
But the church leaders seem very
reticent and wary in supplying answers to any of these difficult questions. One
suspects that the leaders do not believe they should rightfully ever be subject
to such probing questioning. There does seem to be a conflict or inconsistency
between the church claiming to contain and represent all truth, while being
unable to give satisfactory answers to a whole host of inconvenient questions
about history, doctrine, policy, performance, and behavior.
One suspects that
they would have a great deal more justification for hiding from or avoiding
these questions if our current church headquarters had not set itself up as
essentially infallible in all things religious to justify the power and influence
it wields. One cannot really have it both ways, by first saying that they are
the ultimate authority on every question concerning religion, and then only
offering partial and incomplete answers when asked for a response. This lack of
openness and thoroughness in answers prompts many to assume that many even more
serious things are being kept from them and remain unexplained, an assumption
that appears to be correct.
The current state of affairs seems
very chaotic and troublesome to me, as apparently it does to many other people
as well, especially those people who have made the extraordinary effort to
either find or create a replacement religion in their lives, after deciding
that the LDS church has been measured and found wanting for many different
reasons important to the various individuals.
After all my studies, I believe I have
finally found a very high-level narrative which seems solid and verifiable to
me and explains where we are, how we got here, and what it would take to put us
back on the correct course, while, in the process, answering a very large
number of legitimate questions about church policy and behavior.
Here, quickly, are the main elements
of this new narrative:
1. We
have the wrong organizational model
It is evident that the church during
the life of Christ and for perhaps up to 100 years thereafter, essentially HAD
no central headquarters, beyond the traveling Twelve, a situation which is
incomprehensible today, but was vital to the stunning success of that early
church which grew at a rate of about 8% to 10% a year for perhaps 300 years.
Without having to delve into massive old medieval tomes to verify this
assertion, we might merely notice that when the Apostle John, writing in the
Book of Revelation, addressed seven of the independent churches in Asia, he was
indeed addressing them as independent, self-contained units of the church, each
with its own "angels" or leaders. We might surmise that if they were
indeed as independent as it appears, that would require that they each had all
the priesthood authority and priesthood keys which would allow each of the
churches to operate independently, supplying all priesthood ordinances and
blessings necessary for complete salvation – baptism, gift of the Holy Ghost,
endowments, marriages and sealings, etc.
This dispersion of multiple
self-contained and independent church units throughout Asia, and elsewhere,
would have had many good effects. It would allow the churches to function very
effectively using their local languages and their local culture to the best
advantage, without waiting for "one-size-fits-all" policy
pronouncements from a distant and poorly informed capital city. If any one
particular church came under political attack, there would be many other places
where the members could disperse, and it would be nearly impossible for
multiple political governments to attack all churches at the same time, thereby
wiping out every vestige of the priesthood and priesthood structure. In other
words, this dispersed organization should make the overall church very
resilient and durable. It would also make it very Christian in everyday behavior,
more so than anything seen today.
At the practical level, since there
was no more Law of Moses, with its rigid tithing regime coupled with the
specialized tribal assignments, the members would be free to use all of their
personal resources locally. There would be no need to send these resources to
some distance place where they would likely be poorly administered and probably
even lost through waste or fraud or political interference. In other words, the
church members could all behave exactly like the Good Samaritan who used his
own resources immediately to the best possible effect, solving the problems of
those around them, and giving rise to a great desire among many people to join
with the Christians who so obviously quickly took good care of their own as
well as many outsiders, providing a very effective social insurance network
that required no subscription fees or expensive professional workers. This was
a kind of very simple and uncomplicated tribalism or "band of
brothers." Their extremely effective use of personal time and resources,
something essentially impossible to do under a Law of Moses tithing regime,
which is essentially the regime operating today, could not help but be
impressive to everyone who knew anything about these good Christians.
There is much talk in the church today
about the phrase "and there were no poor among them," and that seems
mysterious to many. Many seem to assume that this could only happen if there
were a powerful central government organization which taxed the members,
collected all the goods and money to one place, and then set up a process for
dispensing some subset of those resources to the needy through professional
operatives.
But as we can easily observe in our
own national government and in the LDS church today, that rigid centralizing of
the process of welfare is extremely wasteful and inefficient. As described in
the Book of Mosiah, in the ideal church there was no central organization to
handle such matters and no need for such an organization. If there were people
in need, then the church members simply took care of the matter locally and
that was the end of it. There was no need to form a great and wasteful
professional bureaucracy which itself would probably consume most of the
offerings in the first place, before they could ever get to those who actually
needed help. In most cases, almost all peoples' religious needs are local
needs, and it is quite completely pointless to send resources off to some
distant place and then hope to get some of them back for local use. Far better simply
to find the problems and fix them locally, and not worry about trying to expend
more administrative resources just to get back resources which were sent
somewhere else.
This is the simple
"non-organization" that was the basis for church operation during and
just after the time of Christ. It was amazingly effective, certainly at least
10 times as effective as our policies and systems today.
Moreover, it is also easy to
demonstrate that essentially all the failures of the early church occurred
because someone decided that there was a need for a strong central
organization. Where the ancient church probably could have gone on forever in its
original dispersed and independent mode, it quickly deteriorated as soon as
things were centralized and the empire-building mindset took over that
centralized unit. That centralizing process included the collecting of member
resources which would otherwise have been used to continue to do good among the
local members, and instead used those resources to support a central
professional bureaucracy. It also included ending the local and independent use
of all necessary priesthood authority and keys, making it appear that one could
not be saved without the paying of vast resources to that central unit and
receiving back the commodity paid for, which was the saving ordinances.
As soon as the church leaders in Rome
declared themselves to be different and above all other churches, and began to
claim the resources and limit the priesthood ordinances available at all other
churches, the church was doomed. In due course, it became the Roman Catholic
Church with all its abominable non-Christian and anti-Christian practices. The
church today is a long ways down that exact same mistaken path, making it perfectly
reasonable to predict that the church today has done all the good it can ever
do unless it completely reorganizes. We can hope that the church will never
become as bad or actively evil as the Roman Catholic Church became, but there
is no obvious reason that the church today would be able to avoid that eventual
situation 100 years from now.
2. We
have the wrong salvation model
The current subscription model of salvation
Under current rules
and procedures, a person cannot get saved and stay saved unless they are
continuously paying a full tithing to the Salt Lake City offices. They must certify at least once every two
years that their tithing is paid up and thus verify that their salvation is
current. If they stop paying that full tithe, they are no longer saved, and to
recover their saved status they must bring their tithing account up-to-date.
This has the convenient corporate effect of keeping all members under the
constant direct control of the Salt Lake City corporate offices, which becomes
the only source of salvation, causing the members anxiety about their salvation
if their payments lag or lapse. This operates very much like today's online
software subscriptions or monthly multilevel marketing payments. If you don't stay perfectly paid-up, you
might lose everything and have to start over. For example, all your business
and personal data in the computing "cloud" might disappear forever if
your monthly payments are not kept current.
If someone ceases
being current on their tithing payments to the central offices, it is not
perfectly clear whether their priesthood ordinances stay in effect or not. For example, if they were married in the
temple, is that temple marriage and sealing placed on hold until all their
tithing payments are brought up to date?
If things are really so unclear and unsettled, since many people also
receive their civil marriage ceremony and license in the temple at the same
time they receive their eternal sealing ceremony, one might reasonably ask
whether their civil marriage status is also placed on hold until all tithing
payments are current.
One of the
interesting consequences of this current "salvation by subscription"
program is that if some group of people in some far-off land were to hear about
the Gospel and wished to learn more about it and begin to live it, the Salt
Lake offices would have to tell them, in effect, that until there was a
reliable way of taking their money, and making sure it gets to Salt Lake, and
having a bishop and a stake president (or a branch president and a district
president) who can issue them a temple recommend which is proof of a paid-up
salvation subscription, then there's really nothing they can do for those
people, and there is no way they can save themselves. They just need to wait until the full church
franchise system has been brought to them.
Only at that point can they arrange to get saved and stay saved for any
length of time.
In other words, this
subscription model of salvation works fairly well where the church is already
very solidly established as in Utah, and more than adequate management power
and capacity is in place, but outside this fully operational and integrated
environment, things get a bit sketchy.
If a religion cannot demonstrate how salvation is achieved and then deliver
that result, of what good is it?
Much like Domino's
pizza, if they don't already have a pizza parlor built and operating there,
which can deliver pizza on a constant and reliable basis, then they cannot
guarantee that the people there can get themselves saved and stay saved. The conclusion then is that until the church
can spend the millions of dollars in tithing funds to set up all these
money-receiving and salvation-delivering systems, these people are just out of
luck and they should wait for developments far in the future. The Gospel is not for them unless they are
living in a First World country which is fully current in the computer age. In
this way, the church itself becomes a major constraint, probably the largest
constraint of all, on the spreading of the Gospel.
So people are
"less active" if they are not reliably and verifiably paying their
tithing to the Salt Lake City offices. The only records that are kept of good
works performed by individuals are the financial records of member payments.
That essentially makes money the measure of all things.
These policies and
attitudes, while perhaps seeming subtle, are actually very powerful constraints
on the Gospel spreading worldwide. If a
person comes, through any number of possible routes, to appreciate the many
wonderful philosophies and truths that the Gospel teaches, which have changed
whole governments of civilizations in the past, but does not wish to put
themselves in the position of being financially and socially linked with Salt
Lake City, perhaps even appearing to become an employee or agent of those
American offices, and being completely dependent on that city and its
religion-related systems for their beginning and continuing salvation, then
that person is just out of luck today.
As an apparent
example, the church today has not yet "opened up" China for
missionary work, just as some MLM product delivery system may not have set up
all the transportation and contractual and patent and financial arrangements to
"open up" some area of the world to begin delivering their miracle
skincare product there and reaping the financial benefits from profits generated
there. So, just because the Salt Lake City offices cannot set up reliable
banking and payment systems to Salt Lake City and cannot build a $200
million-dollar temple in downtown Beijing, complete with barcode scanning
systems to record the use of temple recommends, does that mean that the Gospel
is denied to the Chinese until all these things can happen? That seems to be the current calculation and
condition.
But notice that this
seems to be going at the whole problem backwards from a global perspective. The Gospel is exactly what the Chinese people
need to be able to fully understand freedom and righteousness, and to
eventually convince those who rule them that freedom, as prescribed by the U.S.
Constitution, is the best thing for their country, and even for the leaders
themselves. The Gospel can only function perfectly where individuals have
perfect freedom to live it. So if we are
going to wait for the Chinese government to declare itself as free as United
States before the Gospel can enter China, then it's going to be a very long
wait. The only practical way to proceed is to take whatever steps are feasible
to help Gospel information and principles be diffused throughout China so that
the process of increasing freedom can proceed.
This can be done in many other ways besides having permission to have
missionaries roam the streets, have payment systems set up to Salt Lake City,
and have franchised chapels and franchised temples scattered throughout the
land. Some of those things might be viewed as desired end results, but the
church should not find itself in the position of trying to prevent
Gospel-related information from even entering China in conditions which are not
under the church's control, all for the purpose of holding the religion market
in limbo there until the church can finally legally set up a profitable
franchise or MLM system in China.
Gospel success should
be measured in terms of how many people understand and live the gospel in the
world, not how many are compulsively sending money to Salt Lake City to claim
salvation rather than claiming to be worthy of salvation through the old route
by using their resources to bless their neighbors. It is hard for a
profit-seeking business, such as a franchise or MLM operation, to compete with
a "free" system, but that is where the church should be, not in the
profit-seeking mode.
Obviously, anyone who
fully understands the Gospel will want to take advantage of all of its saving
ordinances, but in today's world of easy international transportation, the
citizens of whole countries could gradually travel to other countries to
receive those ordinances, if that is necessary, and then return to their home
countries to begin the process of social change so that their own cultures can
finally conform to the righteous principles of a Gospel-based
civilization. The church leaders might
say that there is no profit in allowing people to join the church and claim
salvation without paying tithing directly to them for those privileges, but if
those tithings or other member religious contributions are used locally so that
the church members are again behaving as an army of independent Good Samaritans
rather than employees or other appendages of corporate offices in Salt Lake
City, that will change hearts and minds much more quickly and more thoroughly
than anything which Salt Lake City can accomplish through its standoff system
of receiving tithing and authorizing saving ordinances to be delivered like some
kind of mail-order or Internet-order system.
Obviously, if a
particular group is trying to build a profitable temporal empire of their own,
then they must arrange to always be on good terms with the governmental powers
that already exist in every country.
And, for most practical purposes, they have to largely agree on
philosophy and methods with those governments if they are to coexist on good
terms.
If one is indeed
setting up a franchise system throughout the world, then it has to be approved
in every aspect and on every level by the existing governments of new
countries. But it is not the job of the
Gospel to conform itself to all the existing philosophies and organizations of
men on the earth to make itself acceptable, but rather to be a constant and
unchanging revolutionary force which, in the most righteous and hopefully
peaceful way, overthrows and replaces all these incorrect philosophies and
organizations.
As in the case of the
seven churches in Asia, operating as independent units springing from the
church which Christ first established in Jerusalem, and in the case of the
church which he next formed in the New World, and in the cases of the perhaps
10 other completely independent churches he might have formed among others of
the scattered tribes of Israel, presumably each having its own functionally
independent subunits, it is perfectly feasible for people who cannot
practically communicate with each other, or to easily send resources and
personnel back and forth, to still have access to all the saving teachings and
ordinances wherever they may live.
Having a single office trying to get and maintain control of every
possible aspect of the Gospel on this entire planet may seem to be on the outer
edge of feasibility in our high-technology time, even though it was completely
impossible in all earlier times. Even
though there appears to be a tempting opportunity to establish the maximum
possible religious empire, that does not mean that that is a proper and
righteous goal. I believe that no one,
except God himself, should ever seek for that level of concentrated temporal
power, especially not his prophets.
When people talk
about the difficulties of the American church trying to transfer too many
American customs abroad, such as holding church Halloween parties in the middle
of some other culture with a different religious tradition, they are hinting at
a real problem, but missing the point.
The real problem of the connection with the American church worldwide is
that in order for the church to set up its rigid franchise system of control
and profit-taking, it has to have employees or agents in these countries that
are loyal to Salt Lake City and must also have banking and financial systems
set up for the transfer of money, etc.
These are the real-world circumstances and arrangements of American
intrusion that cause all the problems, not some harmless Halloween parties.
If the church did not
require these ironclad political and financial ties to Salt Lake City before
anyone can claim the benefits of the Gospel, that Gospel would be a great deal
more free to spread its ideology and good influence throughout the world. The very fact that it was NOT operating under
the control of Salt Lake City would be its greatest source of success. The
teachings of the Gospel and its ordinances were intended to be perfectly free
to the world, not a copyrighted, trademarked, trade secret protected, perhaps
even patented set of intellectual property owned and exploited by a Salt Lake
City corporation.
By controlling the
salvation process in this way, the church itself becomes a major constraint,
probably the largest constraint of all, on the spreading of the Gospel. "[F]or
the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." (2 Cor 3:6) Our revived, redefined, and greatly extended
Law of Moses tithing system has mostly killed the Gospel.
3. We have excessive otherworldly concerns
It seems strange that
the church which has the assignment of causing the gospel to flood the earth
among the living, has somehow become almost completely distracted from that
task and has been overcome by otherworldly concerns in the form of family history
and temple work. This seems to be clerical work that is especially suitable for
travel-limited homemakers, much more so than for the brave and hearty men who
can imagine doing hard and constructive things and going out into the world.
It appears that the
genealogy and temple work program has become the biggest single program the
church sponsors, spending perhaps $3 billion a year in resources, while the
explicit allocations of resources to missionary work is perhaps only one fourth
as much. This disparity ought to also
set off some alarm bells. That genealogy and temple work program is estimated
to consume $0.5 million in cash for computers and programming, $1.5 billion for
member volunteer input, and perhaps another $1 billion for building new temples
each year. If we knew all the numbers,
we might find out that it is actually a $4 billion program, if all costs are
included, out of an entire budget of about $6 billion. Incidentally, it is easy
to calculate and demonstrate that we already have more than enough temples in
existence to do all the Temple work necessary to complete the entire world,
based on the number of available earthly records. That assumes a time
period of 100 years to complete all Temple work at a reasonable pace
It appears that all
these management inefficiencies and failures are done for the convenience of
the church bureaucracy. If it can make
people worry excessively about their own salvation, as statistics show it is
often easier to do with women, and a lot harder to do with the more independent-minded
men, then the women, who often handle the church money, will send the money to
the church and the church will maximize its tithing income.
It will also be able
to avoid any conflicts that may occur because of members doing missionary work
"too enthusiastically." That is one way to avoid any surprise
blowback on the church leaders from such "uncontrolled" activity, simply
because there is hardly any activity going on. The church does essentially no
public advertising to speak of, and leaves it all up to the minimally prepared
and resourced young missionaries to be the only way that the Gospel is declared
to the world, when it would be possible for the central church, if it chose, to
compete directly with Hollywood or even the mainstream media for public
mind-share. But it chooses not to pursue
such goals, presumably because that would make its life more complicated, and
would use up the resources that could be used for making life easier for the
central bureaucracy.
This act of
consciously turning the focus of the members inwardly, for the benefit of the
church leaders, is an interesting situation.
The church leaders will occasionally claim that people should do
missionary work on their own, while in other situations they do everything they
can to keep people from acting independently and aggressively. Keys or
permissions are held very jealously for every imaginable bit of member
creativity and entrepreneurialism. Physical resources are collected centrally
and kept out of the stream of commerce, so to speak.
On the issue of
saving the dead, it truly appears "that God can do his own work" and
that all of this work for the dead is probably more for the members' own
benefit and understanding rather than specifically for the dead. Obviously, we can never do more than a tiny
portion of the work for all the dead, so that the other 9/10ths of the work
will have to be done through some other mechanism, if it indeed needs to be
done at all. We
have the interesting case of Alvin Smith achieving exaltation even before all
the saving ordinances were restored, demonstrating that our role on earth in
proxy ordinances may be less crucial to the dead than we are taught to believe.
The current teachings
on the subject of work for the dead, including this seemingly artificial sense
of urgency, puts an enormous permanent guilt trip on the members which has the
effect of keeping them from doing something more appropriate with and for the
living during their lives, and tends to delay too many important things until
after this life, including doing missionary work on a grand scale. People need
to be able to read the scriptures and apply them themselves as far as getting
organized to do the missionary work which is implied in the Book of Mormon and
other scriptures.
This is one reason
why we need to dismantle the entire church standing army and let people go
about their work of being good Christians without that enormous resource drain
and constraint on individual actions in so many other ways.
People are hungry to
be assured of salvation, especially the women, who often feel more insecure
about many things and cling more tightly to religious promises, and it is unethical
to exploit those tender feelings for the benefit of the current central church
bureaucracy. This is one of the great dangers of a paid ministry, and we have
been doing this long enough to see most of the bad effects. If it continues on it will become even worse
and we will indeed become just another copy of the Roman Catholic Church.
4. We have bad program management
For all the enormous
resource costs to the members of supporting the central church in its current
form, one might at least expect that those things which are centrally managed
would be done very well, even brilliantly. But that is clearly not the case,
which raises the question of what the central church's goals really are.
First a quick summary
of how things are done today concerning missionary work, temple work, and
welfare, and then a few more of the details. To start at perhaps the most
general viewpoint, looking at missionary work, the church spends overall about
$400,000 in member resources for every new long-term member. One might guess
that with that astronomical level of costs involved in making any missionary
progress, that missionary progress is going to be extremely slow, so slow that
the growth in the good effect the church is having on the world is almost too
small to measure. It seems that almost anyone with the proper goals in mind
could probably come up with a program which was 10 times or 100 times more
cost-effective.
In probably the
church's largest explicit program, the family history and Temple work program,
the church expends about $2000 in member resources for every unique new name
that is processed through the temples for the deceased. A more efficient
document-processing system could probably bring the cost per name down to about
$2. The question then becomes why those 1000 times more efficient methods and
systems are not being used. As it is, the methods being used today mean that
the basic genealogy work for the United States will never be finished, no
matter how many decades this process goes on, and there is no chance whatsoever
of ever finishing the world, although a properly structured program could
process all the world's available genealogical data within about 10 years,
leaving the actual Temple work to be done over the next 100 years..
One might hope that
the leaders of the Mormon people would see them and treat them as "a
peculiar people," and look out for their best interests as a group, almost
as a tribe, especially since the concept of a tribe has a long Gospel history.
However, that would be a vain hope. The central church's failure to think
creatively and responsibly about the social insurance and welfare needs of its
members over about the past 80 years has cost those members, on average, about
$2 million each, for a current running total of about $10 trillion. That is the
equivalent of about 2000 years of the current central church budget, simply thrown
away, presumably for purposes of gaining government political approval for
church headquarters activity.
This short list of
management problems could all be explained in much more detail, especially the
family history and Temple work program which absorbs so much member money,
time, and energy. However, the welfare-related program appears to involve the
largest amount of money and is also the easiest to explain, so I will address that
here.
Explanation:
When the new government pension program, called Social Security, was proposed
in the 1930s, an option was left open for about the next 50 years for groups to
devise their own private pension programs which would need to operate on
similar financial contribution parameters. The government Ponzi scheme of
taxing workers to pay current benefits to retirees has gradually deteriorated
from something that was a very minimal burden on dozens of workers per retiree,
until now there are no more than 2.8 workers for each retiree, and the
financial pinch on those few workers is very severe and getting worse. Under
the government program, during retirement a retiree might receive up to $0.5
million in total retirement benefits, if they live the average lifespan. If
they die early, they and their families lose all the remaining potential benefits.
In
very marked contrast, typically, those with parallel private pension plans not
only receive $2.5 million in total retirement benefits, about five times the
government benefits, but they keep those benefits, no matter at what age they
die, and those benefits can be passed on to their children if they wish.
It
is this minimum of $2 million in extra retirement benefits that have been lost
to all church members simply because church headquarters was apparently too
focused on its own good relationships with the national government and its
leftist ideologies, and was unwilling to suggest and perhaps sponsor some of
these alternate private pension programs. It seems obvious that a church
headquarters that was focused first on the good of the members, would have
snapped up this opportunity to benefit the members financially in a grand way without
costing the members or the church another dollar.
This huge amount of
"free" money could have been used by members acting independently to
create the most aggressive missionary and welfare and family history programs
that could be imagined. Instead, under current leaders, the central church seems
to seek to maintain the maximum income and maximum political status and capital
to itself, which tends to impoverish everyone else for several reasons.
That
self-centeredness is extremely expensive in actual money to the members and in
the more general benefits to the world. In the case of the world, their loss is
that they may never hear about the true gospel or see it in action by members
behaving as true good Samaritans, as the spectacularly successful members did
just after the time of Christ, and again during the days of Joseph Smith and
Brigham Young. They also lose vast sums in wasted resources through unfair and
poorly managed social insurance systems.
As I have just shown,
in a few limited situations it's possible to calculate the cost of bad program
management in all the main areas of church responsibility and activity. But, like the concept of the infinite
atonement, it is rather difficult to quantify all the effects of decades or
even centuries of bad attitudes and policy.
We have the interesting example of the Roman Catholic Church which did a
great deal of good and also a great deal of bad. The damage done, or the good
which is left undone, by religious activity, the spiritual opportunity cost, so
to speak, is surely measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. For example, what would be the effect on the
church members and on the world of having an active church membership perhaps
in the range of 200 million members, a large enough body to greatly influence
the morality and good works of an entire nation such as the United States which
can have an almost unfathomable effect on the rest of the world. As in finance, the concept of compound
interest can double the value of an investment over perhaps two decades. In a similar way, doing a certain amount of
good might foster the doing of an even larger amount of good in a kind of
virtuous circle or spiral. This kind of calculation is part of the opportunity
cost of not doing all the good which could be done at a particular time.
It's fairly easy to
get a general idea of the enormous damage done to individuals and the world and
the world culture by World War I and World War II in which from 100 million up
to 200 million people were actually killed as a direct result of all the
circumstances surrounding the war, and certainly at least as many who lived had
their lives greatly distorted from what they could have been. The ideologies of pure evil which had such
great power in the world also made it seem to many of the inhabitants of
various countries that it would be foolish and even evil to give birth to and
become the parents of children who might have to suffer through something like
that. How do you measure the cost to the
unborn and to the world of the hundreds of millions of people who simply were
never born because of the chaos and cruelty of our world? I say these things just to touch on the
incalculable good which the Gospel might have done that and the evils it might
have prevented if it were more widespread.
Looking ahead, what
if the Gospel, properly promoted, could prevent World War III from happening,
with all the potential horrors of the weapons of mass destruction which man has
invented and manufactured and holds ready for use. There have been many groups which we might
call "peaceniks" who have called for peace, but have little or no
understanding of how one actually influences the world to maintain peace. The Gospel provides those answers, but those
answers have been poorly presented to the world. Where these peaceniks might have said
"give peace a chance," we might more effectively say "give the
Gospel a chance" and actually help provide the basis for real and lasting
peace.
What is to be done?
The LDS Church has
done some amazing things in its 200 years of existence, but it is time to
disassemble and reassemble the entire project, and start over from scratch, so
that it can finally make the progress intended. It is easy to demonstrate that
the church has maneuvered itself into an organizational cul-de-sac, and it can
have no more good influence on the world until it turns around and
organizationally retraces its steps back about 120 years from where it finds
itself today. At that point, with a
different grand strategy in mind, the church could then finally go ahead and
accomplish the assignments and goals prophesied for it in the Book of Mormon
and other places. Those prophecies give an implied assignment to the church
today, but we have completely lost our way and completely lost the ability to ever
carry out those assignments without a massive reorganization of everything from
top to bottom, including doctrine, policy, and organization
The metaphor of a
cul-de-sac is a good way to describe the current situation. But we might
describe the situation a little more precisely by borrowing some of the logic and
rhetoric from the study of evolution, using such concepts as a local maximum in
contrast to a global maximum. An example of a local maximum might be the
tallest mountain found in Utah, which, let's say, is King's Peak at 13,123
feet. Someone might climb that mountain and claim that they had climbed the
tallest mountain and done the best they could, or the best that could be done
by anyone. However, someone who had a complete understanding of the globe we
live on, might realize that the tallest mountain of all, Mount Everest, is
29,029 feet tall, putting the Utah accomplishment into the correct overall framework.
In terms of
evolution, the church started at a seemingly random place in the world, and,
through a long and apparently locally rational chain of incremental
evolutionary steps, has built a worldwide empire of a certain size, a size
which seems quite stable, but which actually might begin to decrease in size
with only minor changes in our social environment. In other words, it appears
to have reached a local maximum. The only possible direction remaining is
downward. In order to reach a global maximum, it would have to step back and
look at the big picture and completely change its goals and methods so that it
could actually reach the summit of the much higher and more important mountain,
which in its case would be flooding the earth with its good news.
If we reread the 1909
book by James E. Talmage, The Great
Apostasy, we might have this eerie experience of déjà vu. For about the
past 120 years, the church has been carefully following the same path which led
to the Roman Catholic Church, the path of extinction of the true Church, amounting
to a form of suicide. For some reason we
are not sufficiently self-aware to realize that when we vigorously and
intentionally follow the path which the early church followed, we will almost
inevitably reach the same destination.
It is no good to flail about and blame the membership for reacting badly
to the now-baked-in errors and inconsistencies. Only when the church leaders
put their strategic thinking hats on and consider the essence of the church at
the highest possible level of abstraction is there any chance of making the
staggering number of necessary corrections to reformulate and re-teach a Gospel
which is as vigorous and primal and effective as the Gospel which Christ
carefully taught..
We got here
incrementally over a long period, but there is no practical way to fix this by
incrementally backing out of where we are.
We simply have to start over -- knock down the whole edifice and begin
again.
When the church
started out in our time, there were overwhelming pressures and incentives for
the church to become centrally organized so that a pioneering trek westward
could be successfully carried out, including bringing 90,000 new church members
to Utah from Europe.
But notice that this
was all a process of people spontaneously following the advice of the prophet,
using their own wisdom and their own personal resources to do what seemed best,
without any aspects of organizational bureaucracy or empire-building on the
part of the church headquarters. In
other words, there WAS no church headquarters bureaucracy, and no enforced
central collection of resources until AFTER all the major problems had been
successfully solved and the initial gathering completed. It was only in about 1896, under the
leadership of Wilford Woodruff, that a permanent central bureaucracy was set
up, to be supported by essentially a government-style taxing program, that the
church started down the destructive path of Roman Catholic centralization and empire-building.
We might cut these
early leaders some slack for their inclination to believe that if some central
organization of the saints as a people was good, to enable them to escape
Babylon and to establish a safe Zion in the West, then even more of that
central organization would be even better for the future. However, it appears
that their big mistake was that it was AFTER the crisis had passed that they
then decided to double down on pretending to solve a problem that did not exist
anymore. Their insistence on claiming to
be continuing to solve this nonexistent problem appears to be the essence of
why we are where we are today.
If they had reflected
more carefully on how the Church was organized and conducted during and just
after the life of Christ, and took that situation as the correct new normal,
everything would have been fine.
Instead, they took as the "new normal" the semi-military and
actual military tactics which were necessary to move wagon trains to the west
and then defend their new settlements from the politically rapacious East and
South of the United States.
Perhaps as soon as
1870 the church leaders could have stood down from their previously almost
continuous migration and settlement and war footing, and finally adopted the Savior's
methods of church organization. The
Civil War had ended the slavery movement, and also rendered it impossible for
the Southern slavers to achieve their burning desire to control the new western
territories and make them safe for slavery, which, in their mind, meant that
the troublesome anti-slavery Mormons impeding their progress needed to be
destroyed. Also after 1869, the threat subsided of a second Eastern army
attacking Utah, a
potential repeat of the 1857-1858 Utah Army, but this time with the new
intercontinental railroad as a powerful support to military logistics.
Certainly, after Utah
finally achieved statehood in 1896, the church leaders could have given
essentially all religious governing and saving authority and powers to local
church units, such as stakes, retaining only the minimum power and
responsibility at the center. But, unfortunately, there are always many
individuals who benefit from being at the head of a standing army, so there is always
an enormous built-in incentive for every government or country or would-be
empire to have one of those standing armies. In the church case, it was an army
of clerks and lawyers, supposedly ready to do battle with the world to advance
the church cause, while being obedient and well paid.
It seems a little bit
ironic that at about the same time the church clearly chose the path of
building and maintaining a standing army/bureaucracy/empire of its own, it was declaring
itself to be neutral and pacifist on the issue of any national standing
army. Certainly, it declared itself
pacifist for World War II, and presumably had done the same during World War I,
even though it is hard to see how the church could remain free itself if the
nation it resides in does not remain free. Perhaps it saw itself as in
competition for its own empire-building resources with the nation's standing
army, as it denigrated that national standing army while vigorously building up
its own.
All standing armies or
national bureaucracies, however necessary they may seem, are usually a greater
threat to the country which supports them than they are to other outside
nations. As we see today, we have the so-called "deep state"
intelligence-military-industrial complex in our nation which has thrown off all
pretense of accepting and bowing to the results of democratic elections, and
instead wishes to choose its own obedient and compliant emperor.
No ruler would be
acceptable to any praetorian guard if that person did not promise to maintain
and expand the standing army or state bureaucracy. By the same logic, it is
likely that no one today could be accepted and supported by the central
bureaucracy as president of the church who would not support the vast and
expanding church bureaucracy and its accumulation of resources and power. It appears that we already have the
functional equivalent of popes; we just don't call them that yet.
The church's own "intelligence-military
bureaucracy" wishes to make sure that it gets to choose its own emperor,
and that the lowly members, who used to have the legal power to affirm or deny
power to a trustee, have been completely shut out from the slightest hint of
any legal power to control the central bureaucracy which demands so much of
their money. Now we have exactly the same set of problems that our nation does,
for all the exact same reasons, and no one seems to be able to articulate the
situation and make clear how inappropriate and ironic the situation is.
It would be very hard
to find a case in the Scriptures where the Prince of Peace organized a military
bureaucracy, or any kind of bureaucracy, to defend his word and his will. He very specifically did not form even the
slightest hint of a central bureaucracy, and made it very clear to everyone around
him that there should not be any such thing. Nonetheless, the church today
embraces this new version of a tax supported militant bureaucracy and imagines
that it has done a great thing.
When members began
repeating the comment published in 1909 by an outside observer that the LDS
Church was nearly as well organized as the German army, that should have set
off sirens and alarm bells everywhere.
Nothing in the religious world could ever be more wrong than that, but, at
the time, the church members and church leaders took that as a compliment. Apparently they were well on their way to
building another Roman Catholic empire, and they patted themselves on the back
for being so progressive. After first being mentioned in 1909, the comment was
oft repeated thereafter. For example, a
1910 conference talk repeats that idea as though it were common knowledge and
widely approved wisdom.
In looking at
information about the Catholic Church hierarchy, the term
"metropolitan" caught my eye as being an especially interesting term.
To me that suggests the corruption of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, as
opposed to the more pure atmosphere and freedom of the open spaces maintained
by the patriarch Abraham. The Catholic Church hierarchy begins with a parish,
usually presided over by a priest, and then comes a bishop of a diocese
consisting of multiple parishes, and then comes a metropolitan bishop, or
simply "metropolitan" who presides over multiple bishops. The LDS
equivalents might be a branch president or bishop at the congregation level, a
stake president or district president at the next level up of presiding over
multiple wards or branches, with perhaps an area authority or area authority
Seventy functioning in a role similar to a metropolitan. The LDS church also
has area presidencies further
up the hierarchy.
The mere existence of
this extensive and very expensive multilevel bureaucracy, with perhaps up to 12
layers of bureaucracy between individual members and the president of the church,
perhaps ought to be taken as a source of puzzlement at the actual need for such
a military-like hierarchy. It certainly seems to begin with the assumption that
church members are rambunctious children, with no family supervision, who must
be watched over very carefully to make sure they don't run in the street.
Or perhaps the
members should be viewed as undisciplined conscripts, as the leaders apparently
do.
It is quite possible
that the beginning of the end for the early church was the inventing of the
metropolitans, focusing authority and resources and power in one place, typically
in one major city. That is exactly the
process that began politically under Wilford Woodruff in our own time and we now
see the full consequences of that unwise choice.
When we have Elder
Holland today expressing his anger at the church members for failing to stay in
the "good ship Zion" as currently constituted, without suggesting
what the problem may be, or proposing any changes whatsoever as to how the
church does business, perhaps we should take that as an indication that the
church leaders are in over their heads and actually have no idea how we got
where we are, or why, or what to do about it. At this point we certainly have
no one who can remember the way the church operated back before it entered this
particular cul-de-sac, so perhaps they cannot begin to comprehend or even
suspect that there was once a better way.
The church at the
time of Christ, like the church at the time of Joseph Smith, was working in the
way it was intended, but we are about 180 years beyond the time of Joseph Smith,
and about 150 years beyond Brigham Young, and all the important aspects of why
the church was successful then have been forgotten, leaving us paralyzed and
thoroughly neutralized today,
Elder Holland does seem
to be saying that doubting or inconstant members don't have enough faith,
whatever that means. By that he presumably is referring to the need for the unquestioning
faith of members in the church and its leaders. It seems that that kind of unquestioning faith
among members is often directed at the gospel and at the Scriptures, but is
less confident about the current church organization and its leaders.
When Mormon families were
casually declared to be units of the central church, we should have realized
that we had gone too far. Does that mean
that now all the families are essentially employees or conscripts of the
central single mind? This is the absolute denial of the principle of heavenly
freedom and of the patriarchal principle. We do not imagine that in heaven we
will live in a giant commune with only one mind controlling us, that of God the
father or of Jesus Christ or perhaps Satan. We imagine that we will be
independent heads of families. Why would
we not teach and model the same thing here, instead of teaching the Satanic
doctrine that everyone ought to be under the central control of a single mind? That is exactly what Satan teaches and
seeks. Anything that looks like that
ought to be very carefully avoided.
Very simply, our
central command-and-control and intelligence bureaucracy needs to be completely
dismantled and all functions necessary for salvation be dispersed to the stake
level, as it was at the time of Christ and immediately thereafter. In those days, there was no central church
bureaucracy, because there was no NEED for a central church bureaucracy. All the saving ordinances were available at
the local level. There was no need to
pull back all of those priesthood powers, those keys, at the same time all the
resources were pulled back from the members to a central site, and then
redistributed to the extent that they were not wasted in making that mostly
one-way trip to the central bureaucracy.
As an analogy, we
might notice that under the Law of Moses, which was supposedly completely
terminated by Christ, 1/10 of only the foodstuffs of the 11 tribes was sent to
the Levites to sustain them in their full-time jobs as priesthood operatives. 10%
of that 10% (1%) of foodstuffs was in turn sent by the Levites to the central
temple operations. Without the need for full-time paid priesthood operatives
churchwide, why would one need the Law of Moses tithing concept? Today, every man is his own priest in the
Gospel of Christ.
In other words, that
should tell us that far less than 1% of the total resources of today's often
prosperous members ought to be designated for and consumed by the central
bureaucracy, if there is one.
Emphasizing freedom at every step, the central bureaucracy ought to claim
no power by supposed right of law or doctrine to take anything from the church
members to pay for the saving ordinances which all ought to be free. They would be welcome at headquarters to
explain the needs as they see them, perhaps for a new temple, and the church
members could then decide themselves whether they wished to spend their
resources on being good Samaritans to those around them, or to send some
portion of their resources to the central offices. That continual need to explain and defend
themselves and their programs at headquarters is exactly the difference between
having a mandatory taxing regime on pain of losing your salvation, as opposed
to having complete religious freedom, especially to use your own religious
contributions as you see fit.
We should note and
compare the efficiencies of the missionary program after the time of Christ,
with the extreme inefficiencies of our current central religion bureaucracy.
First of all, there was no central cost of doing missionary work and welfare
work and family history and temple work.
The Church maintained a growth rate of somewhere in the 8% to 10% range
for hundreds of years, presumably because the church members showed themselves
to be the best possible people because they used their own personal resources
directly to help others. There was none
of this horrible inefficiency of sending resources to a central place where
that central place is thoroughly unable to use those resources well and instead
largely wastes them, where if they were used locally, members could get a much greater
bang for their bucks, perhaps 100 times greater. It could result in a 100 times
more effective welfare program so that the poor would simply disappear from view. All it takes is to leave church members with
their own resources and let the central church shrink accordingly.
We might note that
the entire governments of entire nations have historically operated very
successfully on only 5% of the resources of the citizens. Logically, the
church's demanding 10%, on pain of loss of salvation, should require it to
provide for every imaginable legitimate need of its members/citizens, but
instead it takes its 10% while watching the members pay another 5-10% to the
state and another 5-40% to the central government. If it wanted to maximize and
better justify its own excessive income, it might rationally work to minimize
the "take" of all the other governments which claim taxing authority
instead of simply joining in the taking process. All of these resource flows are completely out of any
rational or historical bounds and contribute greatly to the general weakness of the
church and its members today.
Related Topics
The "required communalism" issue
Another common theme
and misconception that is encouraged by the central bureaucracy for its own
financial benefit (or at least is not discouraged) is the old
consecration/United Order concept, a semi-Marxist import into church lore and
doctrine pushed by the anti-Mormons outside the church and the Marxist-leaning
members inside the church. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were adamantly
against that idea, but the church, especially through its fourth president, Wilford
Woodruff, eventually eagerly embraced it, and the rest is history, as they say.
I suspect that if Wilford Woodruff had not done it, others such as Lorenzo Snow,
Joseph F. Smith, and Heber J. Grant would have done it anyway, but Woodruff did
break the ice early and get things started in that destructive direction.
We must return to an
earlier time and philosophy in order to save ourselves. Brigham Young said that
this kind of collectivist, centralizing, United Order thinking would destroy
the church, and he was completely right.
He delayed it during his life, but his influence was buried in the flood
of wrong thinking that came later. This collectivist
philosophy is the essence of Satan's thinking, and all he has to do is get this
camel's nose under the tent, and the whole enterprise is lost.
That is the rhetoric
and logic of empire, not individual freedom and patriarchy, so naturally, the
church leaders accept it, even in the teeth of the clear rejection of it by the
first two prophets. It is anti-freedom and so is welcomed by ambitious leaders
and their lawyers/Sanhedrin staff. It is the philosophy of a class society,
even while seeming to be arguing for a classless society. In such a society, while
all are "equal," some are more equal than others, as it has been
famously observed about how this philosophy always ends up.
The issue of freedom of religious speech within the
church
A fear of retribution
from the center for "dangerous speech" that could tend to limit the
growth of the current push for an ever-growing central bureaucracy (especially coming
from a center which shouldn't necessarily even exist) is a clear sign of
empire/power thinking and is totally inappropriate for any gospel organization.
This is another activity of the church "intelligence bureaucracy"
that seems very much akin to the same kind of bureaucracy at the national level,
even including some overlap in personnel.
The apostasy issue
The usual explanation
within the LDS Church of a major reason for the need for the restoration is
that "the apostasy of the early church was caused by the death of the
apostles." However, on closer examination, this appears to be a simplified
Primary-level or missionary-level explanation of the medieval apostasy which
actually explains almost nothing. This greatly simplified, and possibly "focus-group-tested"
explanation, which quickly brushes away any logical difficulties about the actual
process of the apostasy of the early church, enlightens us very little. The main purpose of that explanation seems to
be to keep people from noticing that the church today is following the exact
same pattern and course as the early church.
Of course the
apostles all died, because that is what always happens to men when they are 70
years of age or older, and then, some indeterminate time later, the church fell
apart. But that simple sequence does not tell us very much. We should also
notice that the church was still probably quite healthy and growing quickly for
the first 300 years, continuing for a long time after all the original apostles
would have died at the usual age.
As long as the
various churches operated independently, and were widely dispersed, they should
have remained quite resilient and continued to grow quickly. In fact, Christianity grew so quickly,
finally reaching a size of 4 to 5 million within the Roman civilization, that
it gradually replaced paganism as the main religion of the Romans, so that
around 300 A.D. Constantine could take advantage of the demographics and politics
of the situation and make Christianity the official religion of Rome.
As usual, it appears
that it was not the outside attacks on the church which destroyed its
leadership and caused it to veer off course, but rather more likely it was the
continual seduction of empire-building among the many remaining leaders that
caused the problem. This may have been something similar to the later fall of
Rome itself, where it was not really the attacks of the barbarians which ended
Rome, but rather the moral and sociological decay which made Rome ripe to be overthrown.
For example, there is
the story about Peter being crucified upside down. But notice that this occurred about 38 years
after the death of Christ, at a time when the church had probably grown to a
size in the 40,000-50,000 range worldwide, seemingly making it very simple to
find experienced men who could be given the apostleship and themselves remain
widely dispersed so that it would be highly unlikely that they would all perish
at once and be unable to leave replacements.
As recorded in the
New Testament, when a replacement was to be found for Judas, the process of choosing
Mathias to replace Judas, and setting Mathias apart might have been
accomplished with the efforts of a day or two, certainly providing little or no
bureaucratic delay that could itself threaten the longevity of the true
Church..
The 1909 book by Apostle
James E. Talmage, The Great Apostasy:
Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History, which purports
to explain what happened in those early times, itself also explains essentially
nothing. It seems to dwell on the
personal sins and errors of the popes themselves as evidence that the authority
was lost through the personal unrighteousness of those leaders, but this is a
very incomplete and unsatisfactory answer.
We are told that Joseph Smith, if he had become a fallen prophet, would
still have the authority to pass on his authority to someone else who was more
worthy to exercise it. As far as I know, no one has defined how many steps the
authority might be passed along until it reaches someone worthy to exercise it.
All one has to do is get through a few hundred years of hard medieval times by
this daisychaining process, and the Roman Catholic church of today could have a
good-sounding claim to the original authority.
Most of all, Talmage
does not point out the obvious, that it was the very centralizing of religious
and temporal power in one place and in one man within the church which was
itself the main source and cause of the very corruption of which he spoke. Talmage
finished his book in 1909 and it was published, and the next year was republished
with a larger print run. It would
probably never occur to someone today to view his book as an indirect defense
of the empire-building going on within the church of which he was a part, a
kind of apologetic writing for a church which was intentionally following the
exact same course as the church which he condemned, but that seems to be the
truth of the matter. He probably did not say anything that was not true, he
just obfuscated the issue and made sure that the empire-building of today
seemed reasonable, where the results of the empire building of an earlier time
did not. But it is a distinction without a difference.
From this, one might
guess that Talmage, as a scientist and a proponent of organic evolution, was
himself a so-called political progressive, and thus, naturally, a proponent of
religious empire building, just as he would likely be a proponent of the
centralizing of all government power. Certainly, academics today, who have
filled their minds with the wisdom of men, have an overwhelming tendency to
consider themselves perfect candidates to become the next philosopher-king,
rightfully empowered to rule over the masses with their great wisdom, while
effectively working to lower the general level of freedom for their own
personal benefit, maximizing the contrast between themselves and the masses.
But, of course, that is exactly what Satan seeks.
The well-known 1915
book by Talmage entitled Jesus the Christ
appears also to have been made to serve a similar purpose as The Great Apostasy. If a book which purports to tell us all the
important facts about the Savior and his life, nonetheless leaves out the
extremely important practical consequences of his absolutely refusing to have
the slightest hint of political or economic power and refusing to build up even
the slightest hint of a bureaucracy, or to let any of his followers do such a
thing, that book also serves to obfuscate and greatly minimize the most obvious
deviation of the modern-day church from the Scriptures, that being its
enthusiastic embrace of empire building on every level -- doctrinal, financial,
and organizational.
Talmage might easily
have included in his interpretation of Christ's words concerning such things as
"the lilies of the field," "the rich young ruler,"
"the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head," etc., the obvious
implication that his kingdom truly was not of this world and that no
empire-building and bureaucracy-constructing was valid. But, of course, Talmage said no such
thing. That would seriously conflict
with the project which was going forth with enthusiasm during his time to build
up another religious empire in the latter days, potentially to rival the empire
of the Roman Catholic Church which had been built up earlier. ("But we
will do it right this time.") If an author can downplay these many obvious
meanings, and set the pattern for the next century as to how these important
scriptures are to be interpreted, then perhaps the church can avoid criticism
for its studied ignoring of the New Testament on this crucial point of
organization.
It may seem a little
jarring that a trusted apostle and apologist for the church can also be
revealed as a propagandist for a distorted version of the church, but that
seems to be the situation with Talmage.
This all seems to
indicate that the other leaders at the time of Talmage were also closet
political progressives who were happy to let a more outspoken academic and
political progressive help create the cover story for what they wanted to do
anyway concerning building an empire.
It might be worth
investigating whether the US presidents of that time -- William McKinley
1897-1901, Theodore Roosevelt 1901-1909, William Howard Taft 1909-1913, and
Woodrow Wilson 1913-1921, especially Woodrow Wilson with his vigorous form of
progressivism -- had a strong effect on the thinking of the church leaders of
the time. It certainly seems so, because the church leaders seem to be
incapable of an independent thought of their own on the question of the
relationship of church and state.
During that same
period, although there were some minimal efforts to counteract the effects of
the concept of organic evolution, those small efforts seemed to quickly die
out, and, with the obvious exception of the book by Joseph Fielding Smith, Man His Origin and Destiny, which was naturally
largely rejected by the progressives, that entire subject seemed to completely
drop off the church's radar.
It is interesting
that as a young man, J. Reuben Clark, who later became a counselor in the first
presidency, was sponsored and mentored by James E. Talmage, who was known as
"the foremost scholar and scientist in the LDS Church." We know that Utah
voted for FDR four times and for Truman once, indicating that the people of
Utah were operating on the left side of the political spectrum at that time. It
would be interesting to know if church leaders were partially responsible for
preachments which helped move Utah politics to the left.
Today there is an
apparent stark contrast, where Utah County has recently been considered the
reddest county in the entire United States.
It would take a lot of study to understand how that apparent shift to
the right politically came to be. But I can say with some confidence that
unless the red county of Utah County can get nearly complete control of the
church again, the whole church enterprise is doomed.
It seems possible
that the inhabitants of Utah actually noticed all the bad effects of the
leftist political philosophies put into practice by FDR and his similarly-minded
successors, and they gradually changed their opinions. But at this point, without adequate study,
that is a matter of pure speculation on my part. Or, perhaps it can be
explained by positing that the political attitudes of Utahns are quite a stable
center-right position, and rest of the country has moved further left creating
the apparent political distance between viewpoints.
A left-leaning church that should be conservative?
It appears to me that
we have another unexpected situation, and another irony, in the fact that the
church leaders and senior staff are almost all operating on the political left,
whatever their stated party affiliation might be. (I believe there is a slight majority of
registered Republicans, but some are registered Democrats, and quite a number,
about 4, are unregistered. In this politically charged environment, I would
count that as being a Democrat). Here we have a group of political leftists who
have moved the church very far to the left, and, strangely enough, at the same
time, the people who are complaining about the church are themselves mostly
operating on the left or far left of the political spectrum.
I see irony in the
fact that these people of the left, in leadership positions and as regular
members, have gotten exactly what their philosophies preferred, and now many of
the ordinary members, even those on the left, do not like the result. I think
the lesson is that leftist politics are always wrong and bad and damaging, but
people on the left are simply too blinded by their own nice-sounding, bleeding-heart,
but anti-freedom ideologies, to realize that that is the inevitable result, but
still they are resentful when it happens.
Really, the biggest
problem of all, is that the entire church leadership and staff, and a very
large portion of the church members, are all operating so far to the political
left (always hoping for big government everywhere) that in order to re-create a
church which would actually operate effectively in the real world, that
probable majority of the church that inhabits the political left, would have to
be chopped off, and perhaps organized into a separate church, before there is
any chance that a successfully functioning church could be created and last intact
for any length of time.
No king in Israel
As a final thought on
the Bible's many teachings about the importance of freedom, no matter who
wishes to infringe upon it, I like very much a thought from the Book of Judges:
Judges 17:6; 21:25: In those days there was
no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Unfortunately, today
we have some "kings in Israel" who, through example, I believe are
teaching the church members and the people of the world many wrong things about
organizations in general and the church in particular.
Notes
With few exceptions,
I believe the materials in this article are either so obvious as to need no
explanation or verification, or are so non-obvious that it requires an entire
chapter of logic and explanation to support some particular assertion. A separate
book was assembled chapter by chapter over a period of several years to
experimentally explore a whole range of church related questions and issues.
Hopefully, that book will contain useful background explanations on the main
issues covered in this article. For
example, a 28-page exploration of the "paid ministry" issue supports
most of the assertions concerning today's church organization.
That unpublished book
presented for reference is entitled "The Church That Could Save the World,
But Chooses Not to." That book contains another earlier book entitled
"Restoring the Restoration: Repairing 200 Years of LDS Doctrinal
Drift." All these efforts, and many others, were part of the incremental
process of forming a judgment about the history of the Church and why we have
reached where we find ourselves today. This material can be viewed at
http://MormonAudit.blogspot.com
On the issues related
to the church's family history and temple work program, an entire book and
several related articles and documents are available on the following website:
http://www.ProgenyLink.com
Preliminary to all of
this are the four books, three of them published, all by Kent W. Huff, which
address the historical issue of required communalism and the issues of church
growth.
Joseph Smith's United
Order: A Non-Communalistic Interpretation (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 1988);
Brigham Young's
United Order: A Contextual Interpretation (Spanish Fork: Theological ThinkTank,
1998);
Brigham Young's
United Order: A Contextual Interpretation; Volume 2, Related Anomalies and Side
Issues (unpublished, 1998)
Creating the
Millennium: Social Forces and Church Growth in the 21st Century (Spanish Fork,
Utah: Theological Thinktank, 2000)
These books are
available online at http://www.zionv7.org
